Speaking locallyor why preaching as memory work needs to be different either side of the Atlantic

The locality of preaching

The practice of preaching, like most other human endeavours in the early twenty-first century, takes place within a pluriform social environment in which many and diverse influences from the widest possible arenas of human activity have a bearing. In other words, globalisation, and the pluralism that goes with it, has an impact on preaching as it does every other type of communication. That said, preaching in social terms remains predominantly a locally-focused activity, and sermon style and content are usually closely related to the specifics of the sub-cultural frames in which the life and self-understanding of the congregation in which it takes place is set. Consequently, the power of the local context is a key factor underlying what the historian of preaching OC Edwards observes as the immense diversity of contemporary sermon styles. As he puts it, such diversity shows 'how radically ad hoc all Christian preaching is' (2004, p. 835).

Ad hoc yes, but not simply the preacher's whim since what is said has to relate somehow to scripture and the Church's understandings of it. The preacher as hermĕneutikos enters the stream of the ongoing flow of a living tradition and strives to be part of that lively continuity through homiletic activity; what Walter Brueggemann understands as a continuing process of 'traditioning.' Brueggemann's perspective on the preaching task fits well with collective memory theory in that it is essentially presentist in its nature. Indeed Brueggemann's insistence on what the text means now provides a theological and ministerial undergirding of the processes of collective memory. His understanding of imaginative remembering as the core tool of the preacher's interpretation re-positions those collective memory processes as purposeful rather than simply inevitable.

Preaching as traditioning

In Brueggemann's thought preaching becomes a key component of contemporary biblical interpretation in that it makes explicit in a demonstrable way just how tradition works. The essential rootedness of homiletics in a faith tradition becomes its greatest strength. This point needs to be underlined because it is not to be taken as special pleading for preaching as an exceptional kind of communication that must by its nature be allowed an ideological position inappropriate elsewhere. Instead this is a declaration that the explicit rootedness of preaching exposes the reality of similar, but frequently denied rootedness, in other areas of discourse. And further that that very rootedness provides a platform for a sometimes radical re-evaluation of realities previously simply assumed; what Brueggemann understands as a construal of alternatives. In terms of collective memory, the recasting of memories becomes not the rather defensive mechanism the sociologist Halbwachs described in his consideration of religion but a creative and imaginative weaving of new possibilities out of the warp and weft of what has been inherited. This allows an adjustment of Halbwachs' rather positivistic functionalism in his writing about collective memory towards a more phenomenological perspective that is alert to the dynamism inherent in the tradition itself. Some words from Peter Ochs' study of Peircean pragmatism in relation to scripture (1998) seem apposite:

For the Christian community, the Bible is thus not a sign of some external reality, but a reality itself whose meanings display the doubly dialogic relationships between a particular text and its context within the Bible as a whole, and between the Bible as a whole and the conduct of the community of interpreters. (1998: 309)

The denial of an objectivising distance between the preacher and the text may be justly assumed in the ministry of preaching, but Ochs' study and Brueggemann's practice are suggestive of more than that: they point to a kind of knowing and learning only available through tradition. What is being challenged here is the easy assumption that a tradition-free, abstract, universal rationality is superior to such tradition-embedded thinking. Indeed 'traditioning' considered in the widest terms must put a question mark against the very idea of tradition-free knowing.

Productive tradition

The 'generative nature of tradition,' and Brueggemann's understanding of the significance of preaching in this generative work has a famous antecedent in the American literature of homiletics. Phillips Brooks delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching of 1877 at the Divinity School of Yale College. More than one-hundred-and-thirty years later they are still in print. They mark the beginnings of the hegemony of American texts on preaching. Such has been the influence of Brooks' insistence on preaching as 'the bringing of truth through personality' (1904, p. 5) that Brooks' thought continues to be expressed in just the same terms in contemporary works like those of Day (1998, p. 6), Killinger (1985, p.8), and Stevenson and Wright (2008). In dwelling on the preacher's personality Brooks managed to encapsulate what in the 1870s was a new and burgeoning interest in the human psyche. It was hardly coincidence that his lectures were delivered in the same decade William James became America's first professorial-level teacher of psychology (Harvard in 1875) and G. Stanley Hall the country's first PhD in psychology. Unwittingly perhaps, Brooks reflected on novel intellectual ideas of his own day and in doing so identified within preaching practice what was to become a major preoccupation in many areas of discourse in the twentieth-century, namely the human psyche and its relationship to action and truth. What could appropriately be termed personalism, that is, an emphasis in preaching on the personal religious experience of the hearer somehow addressed very directly by the preacher, has been and continues to be a major component in sermon delivery and design. Brooks' concept of preaching as 'truth through personality' became a kind of slogan for many preachers in the twentieth-century, and indeed remains a very influential mantra to this day.

Truth carried in personhood

It would be an exaggeration to say Brooks viewed religious truth as essentially something that can only be known in personal experience, but he did believe that truth was at its' most effective and powerful when known and expressed in personal terms. He understood the truth of the Christian faith to be universal and invariable with personality as the site where it was 'realized' through variable and particular understanding and appropriation (1904, p. 15). So although he was clear gospel truth was a message to be transmitted, he insisted that it could only be transmitted via the voice of a witness, that is someone for whom it had become an indispensable part of that person's own experience (1904, p.14). In terms of memory maintenance, Brooks' approach assumes that the preacher is deeply cognizant of the Christian tradition and is, as it were, a bearer of it in his or her own person. Here is the link between Brooks and Brueggemann - although Brooks is far more personal in the sense that he assumes a straightforward appropriation of the tradition by the individual whereas Brueggemann lays emphasis on the strangeness or 'otherness of the scriptural text. Brooks saw the task of preaching as always needing an essential grounding in the very personhood of the preacher, in this regard he meant truth communicated through personality in an absolutely literal sense, where Brueggemann has a much more communal sense of what traditioning is. Nevertheless somehow living in the tradition is seen by both as fundamental to the preaching task.

Here also is the problem these American texts pose for preachers this side of the Atlantic. That immersion in the tradition, as Rowan Williams phrases it, is arguably much more difficult in our social circumstances than theirs. Chains of memory, the linking, handing-on process of memory maintenance (Hervieu-Leger) are much weaker in Europe than in the United States. As Berger, Davie and Fokas characterise it in their book Religious America, Secular Europe? Western Europe has a secular elite overlaying a largely indifferent Christian population with only a residual attachment and lacking much continuing knowledge about the Christian faith, whereas Golden-rule Christianity holds sway over most of the American population which is more Christian and more actively so in ways that resist both secularism and religious extremes. Or to sum it up crudely but appropriately - to the European mentality religion is a problem, to the American, it's a resource. The pragmatism and purposefulness of tradition as exemplified in their different ways by Brooks and Brueggemann as attractive as it is, comes out of a profoundly different social religious environment. Can it therefore be of any use in redefining preaching as anamnestic rhetoric in the UK?

European exceptionalism

Brooks' conviction was that a sermon is essentially a tool and not an end in itself. (Brooks, 1904, p. 110). He was insistent that preaching is not an art form, he wrote:

[T]he definition and immediate purpose which a sermon has set before it makes it impossible to consider it as a work of art, and every attempt to consider it so works injury to the purpose for which the sermon was created. (1904, p. 109)

When REC Browne wrote in 1950s Manchester of the sermon as art-form (1958, p. 76) he was reacting to those who had taken Brooks' evident pragmatism and utilitarianism as regards technique and turned it into a bald instructionalism that claimed too much for itself and was simply tedious.

Walter Brueggemann himself delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching (1988-9) under the title Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. The somewhat enigmatic quality of the title is typical of Brueggemann's style but arguably this particular title signifies more than presentational quirkiness.

Finally Comes the Poet is Brueggemann's echo of a line from a poem entitled Passage to India in the Walt Whitman collection Leaves of Grass (1871):

After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)

After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,

After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the

geologist, ethnologist,

Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,

The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

The poem has its' origin in Whitman's reflections on the grand technological achievements of his day exemplified by the Suez canal and the American transcontinental railway. Its' reference to great and new achievements as 'but a growth out of the past' indeed fits well with Brueggemann's insistence that the 'old' texts of scripture when imaginatively interpreted are productive of 'new' ways of seeing and living in the present (2000:6) but there is perhaps a more playful and a yet more profound echo at work than simple topical reiteration.

Whitman began Leaves of Grass as a conscious response to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call in 1845 for the United States to have its own indigenous and unique poetry. The poems, although full of traditional biblical cadences, were to prove controversial since they used an innovative verse form with frequent colloquial language and some of them exalted the body and sexual love. Whitman worked on the volume throughout his life; the first edition of 1855 contained just 12 poems but that grew to nearer 300 by the so-called 'deathbed edition' of 1891-2. In other words Whitman's work represents an ongoing creative enterprise that in its imaginative expansion and re-working sought to offer a new perspective on experience in an authentically American idiom of English. In that sense the poet comes last as it were to take imagination to shores far beyond those to be reached by rail or sea; as the poem concludes:

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dare to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

O my brave soul!

O farther farther sail!

O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?

O farther, farther, farther sail!

Imagination that goes beyond the immediately obvious, creativity that constructs alternative ways of giving an account of reality, and an interpretive language that profoundly resonates with the contemporary are all themes that figure prominently in Bruggemann's work. In his Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination he writes,

The tradition that became Scripture … … is not merely descriptive of a commonsense world; it dares, by artistic sensibility and risk-taking rhetoric, to posit, characterize, and vouch for a world beyond the "common sense." (2003:9)

My argument is that English preachers must strive for that same kind of rhetoric but in a way that is fully aware of the degradation of Christian collective memory in Britain. Part of the work needed to achieve that is the recognition of the strangeness of the text from which the preacher works. Rowan Williams makes this point in his postscript to his study Arius where he writes,

Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their strangeness, their not-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another. 1987:236)

Homileticians, and the congregations they serve, are 'outside' the text in this sense and are required therefore to give it that heightened attention and seriousness of consideration demanded of people traversing 'a strange land.' The traveller makes things difficult for herself by the very fact of travelling but the exhilaration of new possibilities, discoveries and achievements are not available without that risky venture. Similarly working with scripture and tradition requires a 'making things difficult' in order that their essential beauty and simplicity can be discovered anew. Like the traveller also, however, those engaged in the homiletic task seek, as it were, the advice of earlier travellers, follow paths new to them although they have been travelled by others in the past, and aim to appreciate the sights others have found impressive.

Preaching from mid-stream

Inevitably the elements of surprise, discovery and reclamation inherent in this approach to working in and from tradition mean that that exposition will always have about it certain provisionality. The preacher is always in the middle of things, often quite literally in that most preachers are also engaged in multifarious other activities alongside homiletical endeavour, but also in terms of the living tradition from which and in which he or she speaks. The generative nature of tradition is such that it is productive of inexhaustible discussion. The preacher dares, again an idea frequently used by Brueggemann, to pin-down that discussion in sermons directed towards the purposes of God for these particular people in this particular time. Something is being produced and consumed in and for the present time out of the canon of inherited scripts. That new scripting if authentic to the tradition from which it is seeded confronts the scripts people live by that are provided by common-sense and the status quo. Preaching is not to be a generalised, abstract truth that is easily avoided but a particularised interpretation that offers an empowering and often contested alternative in real and present circumstances; Brueggemann writes:

All parties to this act of interpretation need to understand that the text is not a contextless absolute, nor is it a historical description, but it is itself a responsive, assertive, imaginative act that stands as proposal of reality to the community. As the preacher and the congregation handle the text, the text becomes a new act that makes available one mediation of reality. That new mediation of reality is characteristically an act of fidelity, an act of inventiveness, and an act in which vested interest operates. Moreover, the preacher and the congregation do this in the midst of many other acts of mediation in which they also participate, as they attend to civil religion, propaganda, ideology, and mass media. (2007:93)

Such particularity is of the essence of the preaching task. The tradition is reworked and reframed so as to resonate now. Inevitably that particularity will mean that changes of time and circumstance require further reworkings and reframings. Framing or reframing is a key part of how the individual relates to collective memory according to Halbwachs (insert ref). It is the structure provided by shared experience - the framework, in Halbwachs' terms - which enables the individual to remember and relate those memories to the wider group's shared memories. The theological insistence on the particularities of preaching underscores collective memory theory's disclosure that shared, pertinent experience is vital to the maintenance of social memory. Without the shared experience, however mediated, memory dies. The preacher, in the exposition of what this text means in the particularity of here and now, aims directly to address current experience, both of the corporate body as well as of individuals. In doing so the preacher acts effectively as a maintainer of the collective memory of the Church. The theological point about the generative nature of the scriptural tradition, and the issue of how the developments born of that generative quality remain authentically Christian, make the sociological identification of the fact that social memories change with experience all the more significant.

Of course, the Church has always been in the business of passing-on the gospel inheritance. What has changed is that the value of that passing-on is less appreciated in society as a whole than previously, and there has been a significant decline in the numbers of people who are familiar with the living stream(s) of the Christian tradition. Simply put, if speaking from the tradition is so vital to living faith, inarticulacy in the tradition, for whatever reason, poses a real threat to the tradition itself. A theology that adds weight, as it were, to the significance of telling and retelling the tradition in the imaginative construal of alternatives embedded in human experience, serves to emphasise all the more strongly the urgent need to address the issue of Christian memory work directly.